Galaxy Blaster (Wii U) review

"Galaxy Blaster is one of the publisher's worst games to date, and you'd do well to avoid it."

Galaxy Blaster, the latest Wii U release from RCMADIAX, is a bad game that the publisher has now decided to inflict upon gamers twice. It first arrived on 3DS in 2016, but I never played that previous edition. I finally decided to give the title a shot this week when it hit Wii U, because after all, it only costs $1.49.

The goal in Galaxy Blaster is to secure a high score. In typical fashion (for the developer), there is no system in place to save your score once you exit your session and there is no leaderboard that might allow you to gloat if you manage a better performance than your friends.

In this particular RCMADIAX title, you obtain a high score by firing balls from a paddle that sweeps back and forth across the bottom of the screen. Your shots have to connect with falling pieces of debris, which seem to be placed entirely at random. The paddle doesn't stop moving. It just heads to the left, hits that invisible barrier, rebounds to the right, hits that barrier, and heads left again. This loop repeats as long as you survive without letting a hunk of junk reach the bottom of the screen, and without too many of your shots missing their targets.

There are a few problems with this setup. Since you are penalized for firing too many wild shots, you have to shoot when you're reasonably sure your shot will actually connect with something. There's some leeway, since your shots head up rather slowly and a bit of debris might well appear above one and save you even if you make a bad shot, but you can't count on that happening. Worse, tapping the screen sometimes produces two shots in rapid succession. One shot hits the intended target (hopefully) and the next one just floats upward and probably counts against you.

Another problem is that the game is controlled entirely by tapping the screen, but a lot of shots don't seem to register. I couldn't tell if this was a problem on a particular part of the screen or what, but it seemed like almost a quarter of my taps produced no response. I haven't had any issues with other Wii U games, so I don't think this is a hardware problem.

The presentation is predictably bland. Galaxy Blaster manages somehow to look less visually stimulating than ancient versions of Arkanoid and Breakout, if you can believe it. There's just the familiar paddle, and random square-ish shapes dropping slowly through the air. As for the music, a repetitive loop loads along with the game and plays incessantly until you decide to end your session. It's just a few notes long, so it can't help but quickly grow tiresome.

RCMADIAX games almost always feel like they must have begun life as a student's experiment to put together a simple game demo, sort of a "my first coding project" assignment like you might find in a college environment. Maybe someday, someone will put them all together and expand on them to produce something meaningful, but that certainly hasn't happened yet.

Galaxy Blaster, for its part, works on a technical level. Mostly. It's not fun to play for more than a few seconds at a time, however. The controls are simply too spotty for the precision the concept requires, and the knowledge that your score will just disappear the minute you stop playing eliminates any motivation most players might have to keep playing for more than a round or two. I recommend giving the game a pass. Again.

Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.

For a game that helped launch such a terrific genre, Double Dragon should play a lot better than it does.

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JoeTheDestroyer posted July 22, 2017:

Jason Venter, RCMADIAX's worst nightmare.

Good review, too.

honestgamer posted July 22, 2017:

I'm glad you enjoyed the review, Joe. I'm not out to ruin RCMADIAX. I'm genuinely rooting for the company to someday release a good game. I'm just not sure at this point that it'll actually happen.

JoeTheDestroyer posted July 24, 2017:

I never thought you had it in for them. I'm teasing, mostly. :)

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